DOWN AND DIRTY: Protesters dump goop on themselves yesterday at a BP gas station in the Village while a Grand Isle, La., resident vents her anger at President Obama during his visit to assess the worst oil spill in US history.J.B. Nicholas

BP ramped up its efforts to stop the spew of oil into the Gulf of Mexico yesterday, adding new materials — including golf balls — to its ambitious “Top Kill” procedure.

The new method — dubbed the “junk shot” — was to work in conjunction with the complicated Top Kill procedure and involves forcing assorted heavy materials, such as rubber, down the well.

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said that the company’s attempt at fixing the busted well was going as planned and that the job was continuing despite stops and starts.

Throughout the Top Kill procedure — which one oil exec described as a “titanic arm-wrestling match” — engineers have had to stop the flow of mud into the well to assess its effectiveness.

BP CEO Tony Hayward gave the Top Kill plan — which has never been attempted in water so deep — about a 60 to 70 percent chance of working, but he added that it would likely be impossible to judge whether the strategy succeeded until tomorrow at the earliest.

“We have wrestled it to the ground, but we haven’t put a bullet in its head yet,” Hayward said.

BP’s live video feed of the spewing oil could provide clues as to how well the procedure is going

“If the gunk coming out of the pipe is jet black, the procedure isn’t working as well,” said Tony Wood, director of the National Spill Control School at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi.

That’s because the black indicates it’s mostly oil coming out.

White emissions also are bad news, because that means it’s mostly gas being spewed.

A brown color might be a good sign because it “may in fact mean that there’s mud coming up and mud coming down as well,” Wood said.

Looking at the live feed, Philip W. Johnson, an engineering professor at the University of Alabama, said it appeared to show mostly drilling mud leaking from the well.

Two of the leaks looked like they were a little smaller, he said, indicating that the Top Kill “may have had a slight but not dramatic effect.”

Scientists yesterday found another vast underwater plume of oil about 75 miles from the rig.

A remotely controlled submarine found oil so thick that it completely covered the vessel. The crude extended all the way down to the sea floor, The Washington Post reported.

Meanwhile, around 200 protesters — some of whom doused themselves in fake oil and carried signs reading “BP Your Heart is Black”– rallied at a BP station on Houston Street in Greenwich Village last night.